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[YRP Students' Essays] The Inducement of 2263

In Japan, some children wake up, make breakfast by themselves, and prepare for and go to school without waking their parents. They come back to an empty house and play games, do homework, study, cook dinner and eat alone and wait for their parents to come back home. Some fathers wake up and cook breakfast and go to work being careful not to wake their wives. They work hard all day and come back to a quiet house in which their wife and children are already sleeping. Mothers may wake up, eat the food left from their husband and leave for a part-time job. They work hard and feel a lot of stress, buy some food for dinner and come back to a house where their frustrating child is waiting. There is no happy voice of the child; only the angry mother's epithets can be heard. Fathers work until late and cannot play with the child. Mothers and fathers feel more stress, and children feel that they are not loved, but they are sad because of their parents bringing them up with asperity. This can be called the breakdown of the family.

In Japan, a child goes to school. He might first sit down on a chair with a needle on it. At lunch time, all his food may be taken by classmates. After school, his schoolmates may wait for him and take his money, and so on. The child cannot talk about it with his parents or his teacher and keeps it in his mind by himself. Soon, this child will get stressed and scared of school and stay home, sadly alone.

In Japan, children play games, scary games like killing a monster or fighting with ghosts. Their character loses and dies, but they become alive again and start fighting again. They do not get hurt, even if they are punched or kicked or even killed, and without any pain the character becomes alive again. They play the game everyday, and soon start thinking that even if they killed a real person, they would become alive again. So they think of killing real people. A professor of Tohoku University, Ryuta Kawashima, says that their brains become weak and it becomes impossible for them to think of the pain or feeling of other people.

In Japan, children are forced to study. They wake up at 5:00 and start studying. After school, they have a little relaxing time playing sports or drawing pictures or such at club. They come home and get scolded and start studying again until 12:00. They get good points on a test and happily bring the 98 point test back home. When their parents see the test, they start scolding the child, asking why they could not get 100 points. Children start studying again. They soon feel there is nothing good about studying, because even if they study hard and get a good score, their parents scold them. They get stressed and one day they stop studying. Their parents scold them but they do not care anymore, because they get scolded regardless of what they do.

Young people are stressed these days. They cannot talk to their parents about their school life or about bullying and so on. Mother only scolds them and only tells them to study. Young people get tired of being fettered. When they stop persevering one day, and realize a different life of not studying and playing games and having many friends, they start feeling frustrated with their parents or teachers or society in general. If they were bullied, they kill themselves trying to end everything. Last year, the number of deaths of students killing themselves because of being bullied was the highest in Japanese history. The bullying children were stressed out by their parents or mistook the importance of life from playing games or studying too much.

If they were feeling bad about their parents, they would kill their parents. There was an incident in which a boy set fire to his house to kill everyone in his family. He was forced to study so much because his father wanted him to be a doctor. He was punched by his father just because he took an average score in his school, which is one of the most difficult schools in Japan. He one day felt too much stress and thought to kill his parents.

The surroundings of young people are extremely bad in Japan. This is alleged as one of the reasons for the increasing crime done by young people. It cannot be said that crime by young people has increased so much. The highest was in 1997. 2,263 young people were arrested as criminals. It can be said that the high level of the education system and the employment system made Japan like this. We need high grades to go to good college and get good employment. It is a horror to image Japan when those young people become adults.

Child Research Net would like to thank the Doshisha International Junior/Senior High School and Ryo Kamoda student and author, for permitting reproduction of this article on the CRN web site.